Pennie v. Twitter, Inc.

Issue: Whether Twitter, Facebook, and Google were liable under the Anti-Terrorism Act for knowingly providing material support to ISIS by allowing the organization to use their platforms to spread propaganda, recruit members, and raise funds.

Family members of officers killed and wounded in the July 7, 2016 Dallas police shooting — in which a gunman opened fire on law enforcement officers during a Black Lives Matter protest, killing five officers and wounding seven others — sued Twitter, Facebook, and Google under the Anti-Terrorism Act. Plaintiffs alleged the companies knowingly permitted ISIS to maintain a substantial presence on their platforms over an extended period and that this operational support was a proximate cause of the attack. The case was assigned to Magistrate Judge Joseph C. Spero (Case No. 17-cv-00230-JCS), who dismissed the complaint, holding that § 230 barred the claims: the alleged liability was predicated entirely on the platforms' decisions about what third-party content to carry and what accounts to allow to operate — quintessential publisher-and-speaker functions.

An early application of § 230 to anti-terrorism material support litigation, foreshadowing the broader circuit-level debate that culminated in Gonzalez v. Google and Twitter v. Taamneh at the Supreme Court. The district court held that however the claims were framed, the underlying theory required treating the platforms as responsible for user-generated content and account activity — conduct immunized by § 230(c)(1).